Happy 10th birthday to Lit Hub, a site I’ve been reading and linking to more frequently over the past few months. “I believe deeply in making our small corner of the internet a better place, publishing work that elevates, interrogates, and inspires…”
Welcome to slop world: how the hostile internet is driving us crazy
To be online today means navigating an environment whose design feels adversarial and manipulative, forcing you to wade through toxic sludge to get to the thing you want.
Are social media posts investigated more than physical crimes? The Times
Kottke: On this day 27 years ago, on March 14, 1998, I started this here website. I’m not sure what there is to say about the ridiculous length of time that I’ve spent doing this “moderately anachronistic thing” that I haven’t already said before:
A little context for just how long that is: kottke.org is older than Google. 25 years is more than half of my life, spanning four decades (the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s) and around 40,000 posts — almost cartoonishly long for a medium optimized for impermanence.
As always, thank you so much for reading and for the membership support. 💞
*All is Lost! Please 🙏 find moi … 28 Twenty eight slightly rude notes on writing. “Most writing is bad because it’s missing a motive. It feels dead because it hasn’t found its reason to live.”
Happy 20th anniversary to Swissmiss, Tina Roth Eisenberg’s design/creativity/positivity blog.
Rediscovering the Place That Made You Give a Damn:
When I tell people about the first time I saw the Web, I sheepishly describe it as love at first sight. Logging on that first time, using an early version of NCSA Mosaic with a network login borrowed from my physics advisor, was the only time in my life I have ever seen something so clearly, been sure of anything so completely. It was a like a thunderclap — “the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending” — and I just knew this was for me and that it was going to be huge and important. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but the Web is the true love of my life and ever since I’ve been trying to live inside the feeling I had when I first saw it.
Color Photography of Paris From 1914
Albert Kahn sent photographers all over the world in the early 1900s and amassed over 72,000 color photos in the process. Here are a few shots of his from Paris on the eve of World War I.
That photo is of the entrance to the Passage du Caire at the corner of Rue d’Alexandrie and Rue Sainte-Foy in the 2nd arrondissement. Here’s what it looks like today
This website shows what 8 billion people are doing right at this moment
BoingBoing: “Seven billion people are doing a lot of things right now — sleeping, caring for their families, working, relaxing, eating, learning, socializing, commuting, shopping, etc. — and there’s a website that tries to track it all, including some rather personal moments.
The What The Hell Are People Doing? dashboard offers a playful peek at humanity’s collective activities, from the mundane to the eyebrow-raising. The site presents a live simulation of global human behavior, complete with a day/night map and rapidly changing statistics that attempt to answer its titular question.
And for the curious: according to the simulation, roughly 18 million people (0.22% of the global population) are being “intimate” at any given moment. While not tracking actual real-time data (which would be more than a little creepy), the site uses statistical models based on time-use studies and population data to estimate how many people are currently sleeping, working, or engaging in more colorful activities.
The numbers update continuously, creating an oddly mesmerizing display of human habits across time zones. “The simulation provides an impression of global activity, not a literal real-time feed,” the site’s documentation explains. The project combines population data from sources like the U.S. Census Bureau with time-use studies from organizations like the OECD to create its estimates.
“This project serves primarily as an artistic representation and for entertainment and illustrative insight,” the creator notes, adding that it aims to “provoke thought about the scale of human activity and shared daily rhythms.” In other words, it’s a reminder that no matter what thing you’re doing right now, you’re not alone.”
An Ars Technica history of the Internet, part 1
Ars Technica is doing a three-part series on the history of the internet; here’s part one, which covers ARPANET, IMPs, TCP/IP, RFCs, DNS, CompuServe, etc. “It was the first time that autocomplete had ruined someone’s day. ”In a very real sense, the Internet, this marvelous worldwide digital communications network that you’re using right now, was created because one man was annoyed at having too many computer terminals in his office.
The year was 1966. Robert Taylor was the director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Information Processing Techniques Office. The agency was created in 1958 by President Eisenhower in response to the launch of Sputnik.
So Taylor was in the Pentagon, a great place for acronyms like ARPA and IPTO. He had three massive terminals crammed into a room next to his office. Each one was connected to a different mainframe computer. They all worked slightly differently, and it was frustrating to remember multiple procedures to log in and retrieve information.
“OSINT Tools and More – Editor’s note: Happy fifth anniversary to Jeremy Caplan’s excellent Wonder Tools Substack newsletter. He started his newsletter a couple of months before I launched the Toolbox newsletter.
If you’re not subscribing, you should!. I took a fact-checking and OSINT tools course from the Knight Center for the Americas last month. It was co-taught by ProPublica’s Craig Silverman, who pretty much wrote the book on this topic.
JournalistsToolbox.ai is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Silverman held an open “office hours” on Zoom last month and shared some great OSINT tools, as well as places you can find more.
You can subscribe for free to his newsletter for more tools, and, of course, check the Journalist’s Toolbox Investigative and Fact-Checking pages.” [Note – free and fee based sites are in the list below]
- Craig Silverman Start.me Page
Full of useful OSINT tools and more - OSINT Tools Start.me
List of dozens of useful OSINT tools - OSINT Investigative Tools
Spreadsheet listing tools and descriptions. - OSINT Investigative Tools
Spreadsheet listing tools and descriptions. - NorthData
Search engines for Europe and others. Journalists can get free accounts to all the tools. - Truthfinder
Background checks - TruePeopleFinder
Fast people search - SkopeNow
Paid people search database - Intelius
Background checks tool.
